260: The Mandala Effect

I, uh, I feel like I don't, I'm worried about this episode. Why is that? I don't have as much confidence. as I normally do in what I have to offer this week. And here's the thing about that is I'm going through a time right now where I'm very vulnerable and I think you should leverage that, but we'll just lean into that. Do you understand? How do we, how do we lean into that?

How does that happen? The lack of preparation, the lack of forethought. No, it's just, and I avoided the thing that I used to do in Merlin 2.0. a couple of revisions ago, where I would say things to you like, well, should I have watched this? I'm not doing that anymore. I'm not doing that anymore. I'm coming in. It's your pal Merlin. I'm coming in. And my vulnerability, I think, can be used by you as leverage.

Are you open to that? I'm not sure how I would leverage your vulnerability unless I'm trying to scam you out of money. Well, John, let me ask you this, John. Are you currently trying to scam me out of money? I don't think I am. I'm doing a bad job. Exactly what I would expect you to say if you were right. I mean, what am I going to say? Yeah. When did you stop scamming? There's no one who's going to, no one is going to say yes. Cause if they actually were, they wouldn't tell you.

I know. This is why I recently asked my child that we were watching something where this was relevant. And I just was like, if you ever did become like a secret supervillain, would you tell me? And he said, absolutely not. And I said that that's the correct answer for everyone. That's not a thing that supervillains do. Don't tell their family. They just pretend like they're a normal person. But he also didn't oversell it.

You know, like some people will be like, what are you talking about? Anyway, hi, everybody. It's Reconcilable Differences. And this is episode 260, which means it's even numbered. See, I don't like it when people talk this way. This is like when people try to use the dependent clause starting with as in a headline, where you say something like, you know, the river's on fire. as conclave forms in Vatican City. And you're like... Uh-huh.

But I'm going to move past it. I'm very vulnerable and John's going to, I mean, you could scam me, but you could also just use it to attract more listeners to this. You know what? You could use it to attract more listeners to your other program. It's up to you. That's the vulnerability and that's why you have to treat it. Again, I'm not entirely sure how vulnerable Merlin is able to be used to attract listeners to other podcasts. It's very complicated potential uses of vulnerable Merlin.

It's apparently a very versatile ingredient. I don't know. You're going to have to cook some dishes to find out. I don't know. You mentioned, also, you mentioned version Merlin 2.0, which was several, which was a while ago. What version are you on now? It depends. It depends on the context. In the context of this show, I think I'm on approximately four or five.

Four or five. Interesting. When did the numbering start? Is this like adulthood numbering? Well, I went into it. I mean, all along, I've been thrilled to co-host a podcast with one of the most interesting people I've ever known. That was just exciting to get to do. And, um, I mean, honestly, and, uh, at first I was probably too crazy. You were afraid you were petrified. Well, first, first, first, they ridicule you.

What is it? What do they do? They do that. What do they do? First day is they ridicule you, and then they fear you? Who said this? You trying to do Gandhi? No, the problem is, I want to say that's Nelson Mandela, but then I have a feeling...

somebody's going to bring up the Mandela effect. It was that, was that, uh, I just want you to have the opportunity. I'm very vulnerable right now. I want you to have the opportunity to make fun of me just now. You do this. You should accuse me of using the phrase Mandela effect wrong. Since I used.

Prepare for a title. The wrong Mandela. Circles of sand on the floor. And then you're saying they go away quickly, like the great Nelson Mandela. 24 years in captivity. Are you so blind you cannot see? Now that guy, he was the singer in the specials, and then special AKA, and then later on he was the singer in Fun Boy 3, and their song, Our Lips Are Sealed, was covered to great acclaim by the Go-Go's.

One of the Midlands I think they're from. Hey, everybody. And so that means bonus content. And so after we're done recording here, you can support the program by going to relay.fm. rd slash join if you like. But we're just very happy that you're listening. But hey, John, what do we have planned for this week's member episode?

Aside from me futilely Googling to figure out where the first ignore you quote actually came from. Other than that, we have follow up. See, I wouldn't be surprised. I mean, obviously, you know, there's all the usual suspects. Right. And I think Nelson Mandela. is definitely up there. A lot of people don't even see it. I hate sand. That's what Anakin said. But, wait, what was my point? I think you were trying to get me to tease the after show, which is going to be... Yeah.

Another one of the things where we talk about, we try to leave things with spoilers. It's hard to look things up if they don't exist. You know, that's one of the problems is when you're trying to find something, there's nothing that says, it's kind of like Larry Wall says about the difference between space and null.

You know what I mean? No. I think you do. I think knowing, and this is one reason you and I argue about Google and Wikipedia and whether we want to be able to know correct information quickly. I used to love not knowing information, at least in retrospect. And then today, even, I don't always want to look it up. Let me finish the after show tease. Then we can move on to this. Hey, everybody. What are we talking about, Sean? Even though...

These television programs have not completed. They're both highly anticipated television shows. I really like both of them. One of them is the show I was looking forward to most this year in television.

They've only aired a couple of episodes so far, but we are going to talk about season two of The Last of Us and season two of Andor so far, because our seasons aren't over. We're just going to talk about the first few episodes. So hopefully by the time you get to the after show, if you are a member.

You are caught up on the handful of episodes that have aired on those two shows. And then we'll talk about how those seasons are going so far. Maybe when those seasons end, we'll talk about them again. We'll see. But now it's a. A dual after show for The Last of Us Season 2 and or Season 2, the first handful of episodes. Yep. Check it out. Members get the, this, this episode you're listening to now, plus that member episode in their own little private feed, all in one beautifully edited.

audio file by Jim Metzendorf. I feel like we don't mention Jim enough. Do you want to mention Jim? know but the whole like you know so you know the podcast would do like a big long set of credits at the end because there's like a 17 person yeah yeah you caught me you caught me earlier than i not early you were exactly

8 p.m. your time. But I was listening to Conan, and I was actually just, I'd just gone past the part where Matt Corley does the credits at the end, which he does very pleasantly. But yeah, some of the big shows do that. All right, and here's the other thing. Right. And I'm super far behind on this podcast, which sometimes happens to me because I'm just apparently don't have time to podcast. But the Flophouse, one of my all time favorite podcasts in the past, I don't know, four or five years.

They have been crediting their producer slash editor. Hal Dottie. At various times in the show. Who's a guest this week. Yes, that's right. That's one of the reasons it comes up, although I'm way behind that. I know that's a fact, but I haven't heard that episode. But anyway, they've been crediting him, let's say, not sporadically, but like the placement within the episode.

Where they credit him has been moved around. They give him kind of a, almost like, sort of like, you know, people talk about the fourth, or rather the fifth Beatle. You know what I mean? I think in some ways, Halle, in the same way some people say, you know, Billy Preston. What? Star of the show. Who? Every time you say Hallie, I have to say star of the show. She wants to see a ghost. Yeah.

Oh, man, I wish. I mean, I'm happy that she has a good life and kids because I'm sure she's like a very interesting. She was on the podcast. I wish she was on the podcast. And I wish she could more. Stop raising that child. I know. I wish she could more fully commit in the way that she used to. But she still has.

a little bit of like responsible right also she's a guest star that's easy to understand but the editor right they're they're just to close the thought though and so then that would make one of them kind of implicitly you could wonder who the who the fourth flopper is

you know, of the classic line. But here's the thing, like, the way they do it, the way they credit him... and like the sort of haphazard let's say haphazard instead of sporadic haphazard placement it's usually towards the end of the show and they kind of remember to do it but sometimes they it seems like they forget and they remember again makes me wonder this which is a

you know, unseemly thing to wonder, but I still wonder, is him getting credit in each episode, part of his payment for his job? Is that like, you know, I will edit your podcast. I don't think that's, I don't think that's a strange thing to wonder, John. That's not a weird thing to wonder. I've wondered not about that particular show. It hadn't really, I don't think super occurred. You know why that occurs to me, dude, is blah, blah, blah does our social media.

That's one where I feel like... That's specific credit.

I mean, I don't know. Honestly, I am like you and obviously your entire attitude toward vulnerability and the media. You're very legacy media. And in some ways, I think I'm very legacy media. I'm very legacy media. What does that mean? You're very legacy media. Yeah. a lot of old ideas. Sounds like an insult. Well, once you're caught up on Roderick, we can talk about how all the technology on your iPhone was mostly developed in 1905. Sure. So...

They keep changing things. It's all ones and zeros. Well, you know, they keep changing things. When did they invent zero? They, they did it. They're the ones that confused us. You know how much easier it was before zero? I don't want, this is not an anti-Islamic podcast and it never will be. I think all zeros matter, including John. But...

What are we talking about? I was going to say, if him getting credit in each episode is part of his payment for his job, I kind of feel like, not that he's not getting his money's worth, but I wish it would be more consistent. And if it's not...

part of his thing but it's just something they're trying to do to like be nice because they just want to credit people which is also you know that's a pretty good then i think it should sound less begrudging i don't know yeah i mean like you know you guys did something that's so smart. And I mean, you guys made that little theme song. I mean, Marco had asked me. We didn't make it.

Marco asked me if I wanted to toss my hat in the ring for that and I couldn't come up with anything. It was terrible. You're going to compete against the guy who's been writing a song every day for like the past 10 years? Oh, I don't think of it that way at all. I mean, I really enjoy his work a lot. Gosh, I super admire his work ethic. Yeah, that's one thing he can do is produce a song. And he demonstrates effort.

So that's good. Which I love. 10,000 songs, I say, you got to do before you're an expert. Yeah, the journey of 10,000 songs begins with the first note. The Beatles wrote those 10,000 songs. Oh yeah, they did most of those in Hamburg. Yeah. The latest two or three episodes of The Rest is History have been very unusual to me as a recent fan. They're about the Rolling Stones. So they have this multi-part episode. I'm used to listening to them talking about...

you know, the Battle of Hastings, but, you know, whatever. This episode of Reconcilable Differences is brought to you in part by Yawn Email. You can learn more about Yawn email right now by visiting yawn.email. You receive mountains of email every day. Most of it isn't urgent, but buried in that flood is the occasional message that actually matters.

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Our thanks to Yawn Email for supporting Reconcilable Differences and all of RelayFM. We've got to get on with it, John. What were we talking about? Oh, yeah, the Gandhi quote. Apparently not really Gandhi. We'll put a link to the Snopes page. It's complicated. Anyway, it's a good quote. Wherever it comes from, however it was synthesized.

For real, like there's, you didn't find, cause like, you know, my famous one, this is, this is, again, this is in media related to things that took me too long to realize. is I used to love, I heard this thing in the 90s probably, this quote that everybody attributed to Gandhi. And I mean, it was really widely spread around and a great quote.

Something along the lines of, I would track it down, but spoiler alert, there's no point. Almost nothing that you do in life will be important. Almost something like... was it something like if almost everything that you do in life won't matter but it's very important that you do it something like that long story short i was able to mostly this might have been in the blog age i was mostly able to track that down to a t-shirt

in Mother Jones magazine in the 80s that attributed it to Gandhi. And you can put that in your personal pile, because is that not the kind of thing that, like, is... I don't know. I'm not going to say like your bet noir, but something that like where you're on the watch for stuff like that. Right.

You know what I'm saying, dude? It started with something that's not really anything. Not that fiction doesn't matter. Well, I mean, that's how far you tracked it back, but the difficulty of Snopes stuff is like, okay, that's as far back as you tracked it, but is that where it started? Right, right, right, right.

Yeah. It's very difficult to, that's the problem with all this. That's why all these things always say sort of in this equivocal language. The first occurrence we have found is, that's the best you can do. First occurrence you found is that Mother Jones shirt that attributed to Gandhi. And you know what gets lost in the lights also is that Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill. Well, sure, Ben Franklin. It's hard to get a really good collection of just his funny writing.

They're in weird collections. But it's hard to find. It's easy to lose to the fact that those guys actually did say a lot of really good stuff, even though some of the most famous ones are not real. I think the Mark Twain one about San Francisco is not real. Have you ever heard that? And also like even the ones that are real, like when you see the wording of the original, it gets polished up.

You know what I mean? Oh yeah, it definitely gets tightened up, especially if it was an extemporaneous remark, or sometimes if it was a remark that's an old thing somebody said with a different kind of diction or construction. You know, like my kid and I. My kid and I, I've made this joke to my kid since before the kid was, you know.

uh, literate, whatever the word is for word finding. But, um, but I mean, if I were John F. Kennedy, I would have said, we go to the moon and we do these things, not because they're, they're easy, but because they're difficult. I would have said. I wouldn't have said hard, but we remember that. And when Selena does her version of that speech, she leans in to that Hyannis accent.

Yeah. So for the youngsters who don't know the quote that we keep referring to are the mostly synthesized, not really directly attributable to Gandhi, but very famous. And if you Google for it, you'll find a million hits attributing it to Gandhi. is from this random t-shirt thing here. First, they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. It's very good, pithy.

Yes. Quote that is appropriate for Gandhi's struggle, even though he, as far as anyone can tell, never said those words. And like, sorry, real quick, but also optimized for English. This is something that so few people think about. When I read that wonderful thing the recently deceased Pope wrote.

or he or whatever, his people, whatever. I was really struck, there's something, I'll put it in notes. He wrote the most extraordinary thing during COVID, just beautiful writing, the kind of writing that I just love reading, whoever. So like, is it the Pope? Not really worried about that. There are two people that I'm very interested in, whoever wrote that and whoever translated that into English, you know? And so, for example, it's a really big deal that...

at least last time I heard, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, he rereads his novel, one of my favorite novels, 100 Years of Solitude. He rereads that every year, but he doesn't read it in Spanish. He reads it in English because he likes Gregory Corsos. translation of it in terms of reading it better than that so like to pull all that stuff together is really hard so did he say that because you know you've seen that you saw that movie with ben kingsley right

He went to like, I don't know if he went to Oxbridge, but he was like, you know, trained in England and wore a uniform. So, you know, it's not like he hadn't had exposure to. western culture yeah if you look at the snobus page you'll see like some notions to that effect in several paragraphs of writing you could say maybe and then there was this other guy who's this uh union leader nicholas klein in 1914 had a version that was a little bit closer but

But it's just, you know, Snopes is not going to track this down like Quote Investigator does. But they're basically going to say, if you're thinking these words came out of this guy's mouth, and that's why they're on T-shirts. Right, right, right. I continue to subscribe to Quote Investigator. I'm pulling it up right now in Net Newswire. Because for one thing, I like quotes.

You know, I like books of quotes. I just, I think whatever, you don't have to think too much about it. Quotes are interesting. And I've always enjoyed the way they do. So the whole, the notion, the conceit of this project is there's quotes out there. that are perhaps very well known, but a lot of times amazing quotes you hadn't heard, but then get attributed to somebody. And so, you know.

I'm just explaining to the listener just so they know. And just to make the point of why I like it today still is not the reason I liked it originally. I liked it originally because they'd say, no, that wasn't actually Noel Coward or whatever. What I like now.

is talking about how it spread, which I think might be the part that interests you too, is like where you go like, okay, there was this thing that somebody said and it's similar to this other thing. Like you say, it really is literally like an Irish union leader said this or some kind of a... like a person in the Church of England said this, or whatever.

Could be a German philosopher. But then I used to really be into it because then they would say, so I would sound like a smart guy. Well, actually, it turns out that's this person. But what I like now is talking about the little, the sort of what feels like shoe leather. reporting of like, well, it was in this paper in Indiana in like, you know, the 20s. And then it appeared in the syndicated column. in the 30s or 40s, and then it appears in like a Bennett Cerf book of anecdotes.

Like a Random House book of... You know what I'm talking about? One of those, like, the kinds of things my grandparents bought, those just books of funny anecdotes, like readers, like a hardbound Reader's Digest. But I love that root because doesn't that appeal to the way your brain works too? I mean, as much as you have something like a bet noir about this? Yeah, like I...

I very often with these, the Mark Twain and the Gandhi or whatever, like the process you described is kind of like the organic thing. But I feel like in a lot of those cases, there is some very important step where this thing, which is very much like a meme, latches itself onto a famous person. And it just so happens that we have some sort of standard famous quote people that you can latch things onto. Especially if it suits that person, like especially with Winston Churchill.

Attach it to Gandhi because it's about struggle and revolution. It's like, well, that same quote from a union leader. It's slightly MLK adjacent.

Yeah, it's not, the union leader is not going anywhere. We don't care about some UK union leader, but attach it to Gandhi. Now it's got staying power, but all that other stuff that you described are like, well, did it appear somewhere where a lot of people read it? Did it, did someone read it in one place? And then he made a widely read book of anecdotes. And that book went out to a million people. And now, you know, like it's.

Yes, it's a fascinating process. It's very much like memes in the proto-meme era. But as you noted with your hypothetical timelines, it wouldn't happen overnight because you need to print books and courses to carry them. Well, did you know? You probably didn't notice this, but I...

because it's whatever on the internet, but like I made it for a reference for anybody who had heard Monday's Roderick where I quoted the kid. So if I say the line to you, I want my $2. I did see you posted that GIF. I know. But do you remember that? I think it's... Better off that. Yeah, I was going to say. Is that the one with skiing? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I used to be on cable a lot. Well, okay, so...

That's funny. And I could see that a lot of graybeards like me enjoyed that and clicked that they liked it. And I was like, oh, because you, A, may remember this reference from the time. Because it was very funny. It was like going to see Ferris Bueller. There's things about this movie that feel different and weird in that wonderful kind of genre. Subversive, running gag, and subversive at how stupid it is. Well, and he's got the switchblade that's a comb.

He's chasing after you on his little BMX bike. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's got that Weasley guy in it, too. I like that guy. But here's something he said. And this, this features in one of my, my favorite scenes in a movie ever. Winston Churchill said, we shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France. We shall fight on the seas and oceans. We shall fight with growth. I love this part.

We shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our land. Whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall fight in the hills.

She'll never surrender. And even, which I do not for a moment believe this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British fleet, would carry on the struggle, etc. How about that? Remember that? Do you remember when Tom Petty's plane is burning? Remember that? Tom Petty? In Dunkirk? No, sorry, that's a joke from last month. Tom Hardy at the end of Dunkirk? Yes.

Did you know that movie has three different timescales? I'm aware of that. Are you on the alert for people who still don't know that? A lot of people have seen that movie I've found. You know, I think you're right. what was I watching? Gosh, I was watching something probably on YouTube. Um, and, oh yeah, it was, it was something, but it was, might've been about Cillian Murphy. And, uh,

I've gotten a bunch of Cillian Murphy content lately for some reason. And I said to Matt, I was like, doesn't in some ways, I know this sounds mental to say this, but in some ways in retrospect now, maybe especially for young people. Doesn't it seem weird that Christopher Nolan did the Batman movies? Does that seem weird to you at all? A little weird. Not at all. In retrospect, you put that up against... No, no, I mean, I understand. You know I love his movies, and I'm...

I think he's... You give him the credit for knowing about how he works as a director. Doesn't it seem weird, though, that he got on and did that after his first movie in Memento, especially? I think it's weirder that Tim Burton did that.

I want to see that one with the penguin. Kids don't remember that one. I feel like the Burton Batman. Do you remember the Danny DeVito one? And like, I just got to say, Michelle Pfeiffer in that outfit is pretty close to a special thing for me. I fell asleep in the movie, John. I fell asleep. I did that. I fell asleep in a Batman movie, even though Michelle Pfeiffer was, you know, saying, hell here.

This episode of Reconcilable Differences is brought to you in part by Grist. You can learn more about Grist right now by visiting getgrist.com slash diffs. Hey, does your team ever have to deal with a load-bearing spreadsheet? You know, one that still technically works, but it threatens to collapse or does collapse despite being incredibly important?

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Check them out. Our thanks to Grist for supporting Reconcilable Differences and all of RelayFM. Hey, everybody. It's reconcilable differences. And I'd like to say, at least for myself, that I think Jim does a really nice job. And here's the thing. Here's a compliment that is difficult to relay to a person. It's difficult to talk about subtlety.

not least because it requires a great deal of subtlety. But Jim is a really good editor of this show, and you never even notice the show is edited. That's what I want to say about that, and I think that's a gift and a mitzvah. Do you have anything you'd like to compliment Jim about? No, thank you for covering it.

I don't want to turn this into a Hal Daughty situation. You see what I'm trying to prevent here? You're saying that we're part of the problem. When we sporadically, to use your ad for it, we sporadically... Haphazardly? We... Occasionally. Non-contractually, to be clear. Indeliberately. Thank our friend Jim, who does a fantastic job. He's also just really nice and funny. I feel like you should go by an alternate name on the internet so we could say that.

Oh yeah, that's a good idea. Should we give him one? Oh, um, well, well, my, I have a foul card on Jim. He's a, he's a super fun dad and he's a, has he ever sent you videos of him playing horn? I've heard recording of it. I'm not sure. But I mean, like, have you heard him play horn? Yeah. Yeah. He's put it on the show. Remember? He's no, but I mean, he's not like, you know, tearing off a careless whisper riff from 30 years ago. But he should.

That's a really good idea. Pull-offs are important. I saw a video today of a guy in the Soviet Union playing the solo from Stairway to Heaven. It might be the greatest thing I've seen this month. Maybe we'll watch it together in the after show. On the guitar, you mean? Oh, hell yeah. It looks so little next to him. At first I thought it was one of those little guitars, like an Eddie Van Halen guitar. Because this guy, he's whatever the horizontal version of statuesque is.

And he's very still. He's got a tremendous meat beard and what appears to be a little guitar. And then he just rips the solo for Stairway to Heaven. Absolutely incredible. But we should probably move on. We've got other stuff here. I'm very vulnerable right now. And here's the problem. I have this thing. I have this kernel of enthusiasm that wants to break open and turn into an actual piece of popcorn.

uh about some tech wins that have actually helped my mental health a lot i should probably save that for dubai friday right and maybe here i'm not giving that good topics other shows this is perfect for our show Well, you know, I don't like to talk too much about the, you know, technology stuff here. It's like a busman's holiday for you. Is this really a technology story or is it a feeling story? What do you know about me? What do you know about me? Are there a couple kinds of headlines?

all the same i know you're having you're having a moment with the whole tech headline thing which is a two-word phrase that has uh cemented itself into your brain and is causing all sorts of havoc in there once you're caught up on podcasts and decide to pay attention to your friend instead of just form

some kind of profile, you would know that I think it's actually particularly two kinds of headlines, which I call tech headlines and political headlines. All right. I'm not that far caught up, so what can I tell you? What do you do? I mean, are you having problems with your app? Is it deleting people's files? Okay. Is that why you're not...

Because, you know, the world's happening, man. Maybe by the time this is published, I'm going to do a blog post about it's going to be updated on my app because I've actually accomplished a bunch of important milestones and I'm doing a little blog post about it. Stretch goal. Huh.

Yeah, I'm not on the stretch goal yet. Did I mention that last episode? Well, anyway, I'm going to blog about that soon. No, please say what you want to say. No, we'll talk about when I blog about it. I haven't blogged it yet. Are you still into doing the show? Are you still into it? yeah totally i want i want you to talk about your your your technology triumph here as i'm trying to get you to do well it's it's very it's very nebulous i had these these things that and i only i i uh

You know, I enjoyed doing this program. I enjoy chatting with you, despite all appearances. But I was, I've just been, I've been having a tough time. Not like a terrible time, but just like, you know, I think it's... important to be as okay as you can be with talking about when you're having problems. Not as a way to do anything apart from...

I'm avoiding so many things because I really don't want to argue with people. But I've been having some ongoing chronic and situational depression. And I've been trying to figure out ways to deal with it that are wholesome. and good and it's it's it's difficult to do and it's difficult to talk about but i don't have a strong opinion about this don't put me on your poster but i think if you're having

mental or emotional health struggles, and you're okay talking about it, I think it's good to say that. Because... Because of the obvious reason. Because somebody out there needs to know, I'm not going to say you'll be okay. I have no way of knowing. But to say that, like, hey, that dingling Merlin, at least, like, he was okay to talk about how he's...

trying to figure out a lot of stuff right now, and maybe it makes him sleepy sometimes. So that's my framing device for this. I'm fine to just tick off a couple headline things, but I wanted to talk about some unusual... unintentional fissures between bits of technology in life that have been working out for me lately and have actually helped me a little bit with that situational depression. Is that weird? No, I would think that what you just described is like...

Finding things that can help. You said wholesome things. Honestly, I would say even if they're not wholesome, you got to do what you got to do. You know what I mean? Right, right. But the problem is like anybody, well, I'll speak for myself. It's like, I know my tricks. And I'm not going to make work for Jim. I know my BS.

And I know how I try to paper over whatever's happening. And I know how defensive I can feel when people point out that I'm papering. Like, you know, you write all the way down. I'm totally aware of. at least of that, even though I may not operationalize that in everything that I do. But, you know, if I'm being honest with myself, a lot of the stuff that I show up for existentially.

is stuff about a handful of issues. And there's the ones that are fun to talk about, like what you could loosely call creativity, which is... stupid word but but you know the ability to generate and appreciate art another big part of that for me is is discovering either connections or relationships between things that but the secret kind of Jon Snow of this scene in some ways is about emotional. Do I want to say emotional health? Emotional health.

Do you know what I mean? I got my things. There's like, hey, Merlin had the website a million years ago that was about Quicksilver and index cards or whatever. And I think the things that I find super interesting right now are... are those kinds of things that include, you know, things like connections and relationships, you know, enduring ways that we can produce art and culture that make us feel alive, you know, but also the emotional...

management issue. That's my opening statement. Yeah, when you mentioned toolbox, I didn't know you were going to go in the other direction, which is tools you use to deceive yourself and paper over things. But I thought what you were going for was toolbox in terms of like... When you're feeling bad in this way, what things can you do that you know that if you do them will put you on the path towards feeling a little bit better? Well, the toolbox, you're very bright too.

catch me on that because it's absolutely true. I mean, I remember one time, this is even before our kid was born, but Madeline and I, you know, you get sick when you have a life and you go to the office and you're like on the subway and you're dealing with people all day. You get sick.

at least a couple times a year right usually like how whatever that is flu cold whatever it is but you get sick you know and and maybe even if that's just like once a year i used to get sick so less so i used to get sick a lot more in Florida, but I got allergies here. And sometimes the allergies feel like a cold. So I don't get sick as much as I used to. But finally, Natalie and I made this thing we called the sick box.

And so we had this little box from Costco or whatever, and that had the Theraflu and the thermometer. Anybody here ever have trouble putting their hand to the thermometer when they need it? Like, I have like five, and two of them are smart thermometers, and I don't know where they are. Well, they go in the sick box, because that's where all the sick stuff goes. When do you need the sick box?

Okay, that's a really good question. You need the sick box when you're sick. And you go open the sick box, and then all of your stuff is there. Like, I find that kind of stuff extremely gratifying. But here's the other problem, and it's what you clocked, which is, like, if somebody's drinking a lot, they drink to console themselves, and they drink to celebrate, and they drink to kill the time in between.

So on some level, that's a version of managing depression or whatever. But I'm trying to be, I want to be cool about this, but you know what I'm saying? But the trouble is, I know how I can trick myself. And I know how sometimes what the threshold of credulity is for me to buy into my own toolbox of BS. Do you know what I mean? Don't you think we all kind of do that?

Have you found that even when you know it's BS, sometimes grudgingly it still sort of kind of works? Like forcing yourself to go up and go for a walk, which is like such a BS thing of like, that's not going to do anything. There's no point. And you're just so against it. But that's a different kind of BS title. That's a totally different kind of BS. So like there's the BS of like sleep hygiene.

Where there's the BS of like any of those food and diet fads about like, I saw actually, I don't want to slag this article because it was actually well written and very funny, but it was about this trend I learned about this afternoon called the fart walk. where you're supposed to take a walk after dinner, then it helps your digestion. But it was a really good piece. And it talked about how, you know, no, like, it's not actually not that weird. It has a funny name, but it's something that...

lots of people do, that actually ends up, it could help with digestion, you know, who knows, whatever. But, you know, there's that kind of like, I remember one of the very first times I talked to Roderick, maybe in the backyard, he talked about the two kinds of BS. Do you remember this a long time ago? You talked about the BS, like, like the guys drinking Turkish coffee and like, you know, like messing with each other. There's that kind of BS, that kind of like rock. Yeah. Careful.

Punk rock dad. But then there's the kind of more, you know, corrosive BS that involves lying. So the trouble is, like, there's the kind of, like, and you have to weigh this in real time, is, like, is this fix? perhaps this quick fix, something that tends to help me. This is if you remember to stop and look at it. Let's look at it another way. I'm sad. I'm going to eat everything in the house. Or like, I'm sad. What's another one?

Oh, I'm sad. You know, whatever. I'm going to look at my phone and play video games, whatever it is. Right. But like, yeah, I mean, I guess you could say because I'm not. A less in terms of Buddhism, a less skilled person might say. Well, you know, a less skilled person would say, I feel the symptoms of this ongoing trouble that I have.

wheel out of kilter that I have. I feel, I feel the symptoms of that less when I do X, right? And so, but then a more perhaps learned person will go, well, now I need to really integrate the fact that my brain wants to do that. Which changes the equation if you're a good carpenter with a good toolbox. You have to integrate back into it and learn from your previous errors. So that's why I use words like wholesome. Because anybody can throw spaghetti at a wall to solve a problem.

I certainly have thrown a lot of spaghetti in my time, but it is more skillful, as the Buddhists would say, to have some notion of what the improved state looks like when you're working on it. I'm very vulnerable, John. What am I going to say? If it's something you feel compelled to do, like people just eat a lot when they're depressed about something, it's like, well, the things that in your positive toolbox that can help you in situations like that.

usually aren't things that feel super easy to do. It doesn't mean they're impossible for you to do, but if you feel like it's, oh, I'm just sliding into sitting on the couch today, watching TV and eating a ton, that's probably not one of the things that's going to help.

and you have to find whatever they are for you, is they're going to be a little bit difficult? It's not going to be the most obvious thing that you are guided to do. So are you saying that part of it is evaluating, trying to find some level of... if not truth, at least credibility with yourself about what problem you're fixing and how effective it is. Or just like, if it's so easy for you to do.

The amount that something helps is, in some ways, proportional to how difficult it is to do it. Because obviously, the highest degree of difficulty, you just feel incapable of doing something. When we look back, that's, of course, what we'll remember, is this momentous thing that...

you know, right? Move the rock. Even just little things of like, you know, I don't know. Talking to one more person during the day than you would have talked to otherwise. That is the best. You're describing something really well, though. Like... You know, the truth is, like, there's this one kind of harmless BS that you just want to not make a cult out of. And there's another kind of harmless BS that's just like the...

You know, just the basic friction of life, walking around doing things the way that you like to do it, you know, when you're power-puttering or whatever. But you know what? There are very few bad points in your day, let alone your life. There are very few... Bad points to splash cold water on your face. That has all in the back of your neck.

whole nine, like you'll get, don't worry, you'll get your own way of doing this. And this could be a cold plunge thing. This could be an anxiety thing with a bowl of ice. That's fine. I'm not even saying that. What I'm saying is if you just went and urinated and washed your hands while you're on the road. you could also splash a little water on your face. If you're not sure what to do at 1.35pm on a given weekday, you could splash a little water on your face.

This leads to a whole other set of things I've been working on that I'm calling the reset or the replace. The occasional times through the day that we clear the cache. and formally change mode to different things. But that is so easy and so BS. Boy, that's the best kind of BS. Taking a walk, you know it works. Drinking more water, doesn't hurt. Splashing some water on your face.

Like it may sound like BS, but it actually it it's really unlikely to cause you a problem unless you're wearing like a beige tux. This reminds me of the things you've often we've often gone through together of the, you know. list of things that you do for your baby? Yeah. Is the, is the babies, you know, are they hungry? Do they need their diaper changed? I think it's like seven S's. Right. It's like, like.

Isn't it like seven words to begin with S and you just keep doing that on repeat. They check the diapers. The baby hungry is the baby. And like for just like babies, there's no guarantee if you do those things that things will actually get better. That's the most important part is at the bottom where it says.

Now just keep doing this over and over until something works. Right. It's called parenthood in one printout. Putting an ice pack on the back of your neck is not going to cure your problems, but it may be a thing to have on the useful. You know what? Make yourself some soup.

Wrap a hot towel around your head. Go for a walk. Talk to somebody on the phone. But you do those things, and it's not like they fix everything, but you do those things because experience is shown. And they're wholesome. These are all wholesome. Or at the very least, they get you through.

to the next day in a way that is better than if you didn't do them. And so you do them again and maybe you rotate things in and out of that list. And yeah, you are looking for the one that's not like, well, I feel inclined to just lay on this couch and do nothing. Maybe don't add that to the list because that's probably not helping.

But sometimes it feels so hard to do anything else. So that's why you put on a list, like, get a glass of ice water, which is like, still might feel impossible, but it's like... Put it on the list, you know? What time is it? 3.15? Let's see what it says. Clean body. Well, maybe that's a big one. That's going to be lower down the list. Oh, come on. Don't judge me.

My wife is complaining that I'm not showering enough as I'm working at home. If I skip a day, she's very upset. You know, I don't even talk about the show in the show, but I... Yeah, whatever. I'm very vulnerable right now. I super enjoyed our last episode, and I would actually think that it's, for the right person in the right state of mind, it's a pretty good first episode of the show. But you were so freaking fun.

funny talking about grooming. Sorry. I just, I want to share that with the listeners. I was genuinely enjoying the way you were talking about how that's one of the primary things you have to do. You make ice and you groom yourself. It is this thing that happens in the house that is a big part of my existence. But it is private in one sense. It is personal in one sense. I wish it was private. But it's absolutely known. It would be like having somebody in the house who's a werewolf.

Like you'd eventually figure something out. Mm-hmm. John, dad has special needs. You know, grooming. The dad thinks he can handle by himself, but others disagree. So there's that. Tap, tap, tap.

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Our thanks to ExpressVPN for supporting Reconcilable Differences and all of RelayFM. Well, let's just make a big black box over here that's whatever makes me how I am. And then let's, let's just make that box over there. And I don't want to talk about that because that's not interesting. What is interesting is some other stuff. So like, I don't know.

There's all that stuff in the black box. And it's been kind of a bummer. And I've been struggling with it a little bit over the past few weeks. And everybody has that. So just so y'all know, everybody has that. But there's just been these things that have been like, you know, when you're depressed and like everything is such a drag and like, you know, it's, I sound like a Kathy comic or something, but you're like, you know, maybe not the, I don't know.

bathing or not but like even just dumb stuff like i uh you know i want to make sure i turn on the sleep menu because i don't want to have to hit the remote again like i'm just i'm just you know that's the that's the level of uh things that require more effort than you have in you and is pressing the button the remote one extra time that's that's definitely uh right up there with why am i reminded uh i'm sorry for the sixth time you're not watching rich's gemstones right

I am not. There's a character on the show who has a helper monkey, which of course reminds me of Mojo. And isn't there something right before Mojo is like left on the door, doorstop? Like, isn't there a point? Homer and Mojo, because I'm so torpid, they just can't move. Pray for Mojo. One of the things that really bummed me out is I have these AirPods Max.

headphones. And this is my second set of these. The first set of these were, according to the geniuses, water damaged. We talked about this on a previous episode. And I loved them so much for so many reasons. I got another pair of these. I had been really actively trying to get these fixed and like, you know, it's just, there's not many options for it. So I bought another pair. They're really costly, but it becomes important to the story why this was depressing.

Sorry. Just give me room. Why bum me out that these weren't working? Because I was in a mode where a lot of the stuff I needed to do or wanted to do were well-suited to having headphones on. In the past few weeks. So, you know, sometimes that's something as, like, I'm editing a show on my laptop. Or it could be that I'm watching Taskmaster on the Apple TV or I'm listening to ATP on my phone or whatever it is. And these stopped working. The second pair.

First pair is called blue. The second pair is called gray. And gray just stopped working. And let's just make this as fast as possible. Just please, guys, don't act like, you know, you can talk to me like Casey. I know how to do stuff and I know how to check cables and I know how to check the charger and...

These just were not working. I knew all the nuclear options and all the secret presses of all the contra button codes and all the stuff you got to do. And how many times did it blink amber? And then was it a long white after that? I've spent... unmetered hours on trying to solve this problem. Because by the way, my first pair of over $500 headphones, I tried to do the same thing.

Remember what I said to you on the program last week where I said, I'm not even going to tell you about my second pair of AirPods. Remember me saying that? I do. And then I compared it to that scene in the wonderful movie Hero. where two of the antagonists and the protagonists have a fight in their heads before they have the real fight. So I didn't even bring it up. Well, here's the big box over here of the things that make one how one is, including sad.

And then there's like the ways you deal with that and whatever. But just one like tiny little dumb thing was, and then when I went to sleep, I didn't have my headphones. So I'm not getting the slip. I'm not getting the switching. easily between devices. I'm just not getting all of the stuff that I'm completely used to, like, living in these headphones. So...

Maybe have a dark gray box over here for whether you think it's okay that I like my headphones so much. So I go, I fall back on my Sony headphones and they're fine. They're fine. If you want to change any of the things about them, there's an app, and the app wants to know where you are, and the app wants to make sure it can check your barometric pressure to make sure everything sounds like Joe Rogan. I don't know what this thing does, but...

I no longer had the switching, but I also had like another half inch of width on each side of the headphone when I went to sleep at night. Yeah, they're not as slim as the Apple. Yeah, they're real. And I don't know what happened, but I let go and I let God. John, I let go and I let whatever passes for God because I went to the dingus. And I was like, hey, buddy, it's me again. The guy from the blue headphones.

And I'll cut this short to let you just get in here. Over time, we were able to figure out what that problem was, which was difficult to do. It was very typically sort of opaque Apple problem to have, where even if you know the information, you don't really know the information. And there's only so much you can do with trying to bring it up on your computer and all that kind of stuff.

But it was absolutely successful. After one night of the thing we tried over and over, which is the charging on the way and waiting for it to, like, softly reboot and reset itself. Because, you know, those kinds of problems are so fun to solve. The things that require, there's an overnight in every attempt. And it totally worked. Now, here's what I bring to you. I bring you that. The other thing I bring to you is, this has made me start realizing...

that the letting go and letting God to solve problems with the dingus or to like fix a dumb thing, similar to the kinds of things you solve with the dingus. I think it's been good for me. And per a blog post. from a few weeks ago by me, getting in the habit of noticing the good things in life or the things that worked out, or in my case, the tech headlines that succeeded, you can't help but become...

less sad and a little more grateful and happy when you start noticing those things. So I'm going way out on a limb and being vulnerable to talk about how using the dumb dingus that nobody trusts kind of helped me a little bit.

I think this is a perfect application for using something like ChatGPT because, well, for a couple of reasons. First of all, you're starting off with a broken thing. So are you worried about making it so your headphones don't work? Guess what? They already don't. Like, it's really...

probably not going to get any worse if they literally don't work i mean i guess like a person to flames or something and burn your house down but in general i feel like they're not going to get anywhere second you'll be able to tell

whether it works because it's going to tell you to do stuff and you can try it all the code stuff right you're going to run it and you're going to be like did it work did it not work maybe it'll tell you to press buttons don't exist maybe it'll tell you to do things that don't do anything and that is life is the

unit test right and guess what you're no worse off than you were in the beginning but you can go back to it and say hey i did this and you said the light would turn green but it didn't it turned white and blah blah blah and you can have that back and forth and honestly like there is an immediate test for the things that it tells you to do and you're going to do it anyway like if you were say you weren't using chat tt say say you just

Thinking up IDs on your own. Say you're using Google. Say you ask your neighbor. Whatever the source of solutions to this problem is, you're going to try it because that's how you figure out whether it works or not. Right. And then finally. Yeah. Keep going. I'm super interested in this. I bet there are tons of people in the world with broken.

AirPods headphones because of the stupid way that Apple does firmware or whatever the hell. We're not going to get too deep into it, but this is kind of a known issue with Apple products of like, oh, just leave it in the case and it'll do a firmware update whenever it feels like. It was easier to up... It was easier to completely redo the functionality of my Linksys WRT54G than it is to get a pair of headphones that should work.

into a state where it knows they should be working. Does that make sense? Talk about a black box. Flashing the firmware. on a WRT-54G was easier than troubleshooting my headphones. Because you could just do it when you wanted to do it. Like, there was a process, and this process is like, well, just... But no, but, like, I'm just trying to get at the fact that it's, like, as easy as a download or an upload button would be today on a social media site. Click the end.

image thing it uploads an image as easy as doing that with like less than a mag of stuff on disk completely changed the functionality of the entire hardware device because they had one way to do it and if you screwed it up That's your problem. But that was how you did it. It's just that it's so arcane. I don't know what maester at the Citadel I have to get on my side to solve some of these incredibly stupid and persistent problems that no one takes care of.

Right. And like because this product is misdesigned in this way, lots of people have this problem and they're out there talking about the problem that they have and they're out there talking about things that they tried. And this is the case where if you were to Google for it.

you're going to come up with a lot of hits that are either telling you stuff you already know or telling you bad information or just stuff that is not what you're looking for because what are you going to say? Or just stuff they heard. And then you've talked about this so many times, three clicks through the links or through the page responses later, maybe the person pops in and goes, oh, no, that was wrong. That doesn't work.

yeah two years later they say i remember i posted how this was solved my problem actually so then you just go to the last one and it's just six people in a row saying did anybody did anyone ever did anyone ever solve this right yes exactly this is a place where um this is cutting this is cutting through all of that conceptualizing chat GPT as a different kind of search engine.

This is a place where it excels because it is very much like, I mean, it crawls all the web and all the information. It squishes it all up into, you know, you can think of it as a form of compression tube. That's kind of a computer science, the way to think about it. But anyway, think of it as a search engine. But instead of you, instead of asking it things and having. and give you back links that are relevant to the thing you asked for.

It will synthesize from all those things that was on those links and try to talk back to you to explain what it has synthesized from all of them. And that's a task that if you were to try to do it as a human, you'd have to visit so many links and wade through so many stories. which were not irrelevant most of which ended in like oh i never did get this fixed or i couldn't figure it out my left hand is permanently command shift

Because this is when new window, no, I'm sorry, new tab, new tab, new tab. Like I know I'm going to have, I have a process at this point of going through the first entire first page of results about something to try and find the one. And of course I've already done the thing where I've said,

only show me results from the last year, like all that stuff. I mean, it's very, that's the wonderful thing about Google for 25 years is that it's doable, but it is extremely inefficient as a problem-solving method. And also when you're doing it as a human, there's no... way you are going to consume the number of web pages that about this topic that chat GPT has absorbed, you know, because there's the scale is off the charts. And so now what you're essentially doing is say, search the web.

As in the stuff that you crawled to make your thing. Don't give me back resulting pages that might have something about this. Instead, synthesize the hojillion pages that you read and try to tell me something based on them, based on yes, word frequency and association and blah, blah, blah. to get me towards an answer. And going back and forth with that is, first of all, it's more pleasant.

than going back and forth through a thousand tabs. And second of all, in your case, it was more successful because you'd eventually solved your problem, even though it may have led you down blind alleys and said things that weren't wrong or whatever. Every time it did, you had a thing to try and test and you could report back the results. And it was.

Like having a conversation with the database that is behind a search engine, rather than just saying, give me a result, I'll go read it. Give me a result, I'll go read it. Give me a result, I'll go read it. It's a disruptively different approach to managing that information.

yeah and thinking of it more like a search because it really is honestly like it's like a search engine that doesn't work like a search engine does but it's doing the same thing like where did it get all this information on airpods from the same place you would if you googled it but you're not going to spend

Like it would take you a hundred years to find all the ways that it's done. I have a phrase I want to try and pitch to you, but I'll just say the, I don't know, part of it also is, you know. that it be credible in all of those things, you know. It feels like sometimes, in the best of ways, hopefully, it's a cross between a reference librarian and a therapist. And here's why I say that, because...

If you show up to the, well, if any of you folks went to post-high school education college, you've at some point certainly walked up to that desk. Maybe you've done this at your library in the suburbs. You walk into that desk where there's this amazing person, like a reference librarian. This is like, this is the Citadel.

writ small, right? You show up and this person, you say to them, where would I, you could even say to them, where would I find the Time magazines from the 1950s? And they could point you to that. Or you could say, is there a way to get this certain kind of, you know, weird book or periodical? I'd like to get, they can help you with that the best. And I, this is why librarians are so sexy is like you go to them with like a little mystery.

about something. And they are, do you know what I'm talking about, John? They are so good at, like, we have several friends who are... partners with librarians. And they're all fascinating people. And they love a little mystery. They can help you solve it. So I love that part of ChatGPT. Yeah, you know what? It'll help you find Time Magazine.

But that's not really what it's good at. What it's really good at is helping you understand this connection of information between this thing you want or think you want and like what's out there in the world. So that reference librarian, but why the second part? Why the therapist?

Because there's a certain role that ChatGPT plays or can play if you're open to it, if you're vulnerable, say, is to be open to the idea that you might know more about this than I do or you might know more about this different than I do. And the way that I leapt hugely forward with using this platform, and it ends up constituting a large part of the point I want to try to make.

is I did truly let go and let God. And I stopped. I tried to steer entirely clear of the XY problem. I would just go in and say what I wanted. That's fine. That's good. But then there's one and a half other things. The half other thing is, yes, I am using that integration with prompt or terminal or whatever. ChatGPT's integration with Mac apps.

differs a lot from app to app, but it's never been dumb and it's always been helpful. But the big one, John, is, and I started this during the vibe coding challenge, every time something comes up with an error or whatever, I just... Command shift five, copy, paste. And then I say okay or check or whatever, right?

This is the beautiful part for me is like, in some ways, the therapist part of this is me just trying to completely take out my ego and my arrogance and just say, this is what the screen looks like. What do I need to change? If I want my Plex to stream faster, what stuff on this page do I have to change? And it tells me every single one in a summary table.

yeah that's what i'm doing when i'm when i'm using it for coding stuff uh it will spit out a bunch of code that doesn't work i will paste it in it will not work it will produce some errors i just paste the error right back to it i give no context i don't even say here's the error it produced what can you tell me about this i literally just whatever

the error is i just paste it in and i and it produces another error so i'll fix that for you and you know what john just let me just say to the folks who are listening if this all sounds like you know blah blah blade runner stuff at no point does it ever say to you i don't understand this image format

Or, why did you upload this? Or, haha, that's funny. This looks like an image of a screen on a modern computer. Haha. It doesn't do any of that. It understands and... huge amounts of air quotes, context in a way that is kind of overwhelming. If there's any part of this that really feels, maybe not human, but certainly very interesting, is that ability to seemingly provide context. And I'm sure you do this. I know I do this. I throw stuff at it all the time.

that makes almost no sense just to see what it thinks it is. And it varies from thread to thread. It's all different. When I got to the point where I let go and let God, which needs a better name, and I just went into that mode, I have like half a dozen things in the last week, John, that have been bothering me forever, where I took the approach of sitting on my Mac laptop.

in chat GPT, just, and sometimes often with prompt open. And I just sat there and like copied and pasted and said things. And I mostly focused on the disambiguation and clarity of what I want. and then very faithfully following within reason what it told me to do. And I solved like half a dozen things, and it gave me a great sense of accomplishment. Yeah.

For things that are well-suited to what it's doing, it's a great fit, especially if it's a small thing. The stakes are low. It's just annoyed you. It's not the type of thing that is... motivated you to do a weeks long thousand tab google struggle to do it how about i do the easier version which is i'm not going to do all that work i'm just going to chuck a bunch of words over the hill into this uh weird search engine that talks to me

and see how that goes. And, you know, with coding things, when I say where I just paste the error back to and everything, that doesn't always converge on a solution. Very often it goes off into the weeds and it's like, nope, close this discussion. It didn't work. But don't you appreciate... Yeah, go.

Even when that happens, even when I paste the arrow back, I get something out of that thread because I realize, first of all, that the approach, whatever approach it was trying to do here. Yes, you learned something about yourself. Well, yeah, well, the approach that it was taking is not going to work. And eventually I understand why it's not going to work.

And then often it gives me an idea about something I should try next. So the next time I talk to it, I won't be asking as something as simple as like, here's the big thing that I want. Now I have some more information because I know at least one approach is not going to work.

and you know seeing it go off into the weeds and get confused and recorrect itself sometimes it'll oscillate where it's like oh i guess that didn't work try this i'm like no it doesn't work and it'll go between a and b both of which don't work and it'll go back and forth because whenever you complain about a it offers b and whenever you go back to b it offers a

And you can explain that to us. I mean, like, I don't, I'm not really, I'm not really following the stuff about whatever glazing or whatever. I haven't noticed a huge change in tone, but like there has been, and you, you, this is an ongoing bit. for me and you in our message thread is like where I say X and you say, yeah, it'll do whatever you've told it. It thinks X is right. Or something like that. Right.

Where it is very susceptible. And this is very compliant. Like it's very willing to take it. I think it's more the compliant. I think it's like Scott Farkas's. Well, I mean, I'll put it this way. The opposite is if it. The thing that we would expect it to do if there was actual like intelligence or something there is like push back when we say something, we know it's wrong, but it doesn't know anything. So.

Right, right, right. A ChatGPT would not be a useful product if when you type things into it, it was constantly pushing back at you. Like saying, no, that's not a thing. Basically that it's Carl Van Hoot or Turns Out guy, where it just goes, oh, I think you mean Star Wars.

But if it just said, no, I can't do that. That's not a thing. And we're like, we'll just try. And you'd have this whole conversation with it. Can you just at least try? Give me, well, I don't actually know how that, but just guess. Give me, like, we want you to work like a search engine. We know you have all this data. So we want it to be the case that when.

whatever we put in there, you're going to give me something back. And yeah, something like that means that if you ask it something where there's no information, it's corpus of data, it's going to give you something back and it's going to be entirely fabricated from nothing because it doesn't like it never crawled a webpage that had this information. So what do you expect it to do?

Like, it's not going to, like, there's no other way for it to, if it's not part of the model, you're never going to get the right answer, but it will always give you an answer. And we want it to do that, despite the fact that yes, it means vertical. Do you think that's what people, when people think about...

safeguards and guardrails for... all things related to ai and there are a lot of things related to ai but just the public's conception of that do you think when people say stuff like we've got to put up guardrails against what i believe is called agi right those are all such different things But what do you think is the public's idea of what those guardrails should be? Should it be something like an eighth grade teacher who says that's not a thing?

Do you think that's what most people, do you follow what I'm asking you? Like, should your prompt or should your prompt be met by you're a bad, weird person? That's an odd thing to ask. Yeah, well, I think... for guardrails a lot of them saying like don't how can we make this not be harmful how can we make it not tell like you know

Not make situations worse. Not, for example, tell vulnerable people things that's going to make them feel worse. Not, you know, tell kids how to make bombs and stuff like that. That's a lot of the guardrails they're talking about. It's like, okay, this... This tool can be damaging, especially damaging because of the way it works as a sort of a conversational thing. How do we stop?

those bad things it's kind of the same way it's like how do we how do we stop google from giving like search results that have child porn in them or something it's very similar but like the much more sophisticated version of that um and so a lot of the guardrails work is sort of

trying to not do harm with the product as it exists i think the public's conception of guardrails relies on the public's misconception about what chat gpt is because you know it looks and sounds like a person so it's very easy to fool people into thinking it is and like a normal person has so many cycles Jesus Christ we all have so only so many cycles for just any given topic but in terms of the subtleties that keep changing

That's a lot for a normal person to try and keep up. Yeah, I mean, that's why it's a compelling product because it does fool us. Like that is, if it didn't...

But also, even the industry stuff is changing so quickly that there's not a quick shortcut to go, Apple's the good company and Microsoft is the bad company. But for people who use these products a lot, what they want it to do is like, okay, but when you don't know the... answer can't you just be honest and say you don't know the answer and there is no knowing and there is no answer there is just input and output and it's like yeah it's like what if your atm doesn't know it's an atm

Does that change? How much does that change about your relationship with us? Because of how good these tools are at fooling us, and that is part of their value. A lot of the conversation about guardrails starts from a false premise of the thing we're trying to guard against. Like we want this to be an intelligent thing that we can reason with and tell it to do nice things and not do mean things and be honest about what it knows. And that's like.

8,000 degrees removed from what the situation actually is. That's like trying to make a blade that can't cut a person. Yeah, it's like, it's much better. It's like, it's...

To be clear, I'm not saying that's what people who work on these models are doing. I'm saying that's, I think, what the common person's conception of what they want to do. I appreciate that you're also kind of restricting it to what I ask you about, which is like, how do you think normal people think about this? And that is the obvious.

way that normal people should think about it but if you're the person making the model i think at this point what you should be obviously you know that's not the case but really what you want to do is

How can we make this model more useful to people? Because it's already useful. It already does useful things. Is there something we can do to change it so it's more useful? And one of the ways it becomes unuseful is, you know, whatever people write in, it's going to give you something back, even if it has no idea.

Can we help with that in some way? Like, can we, you know, and that's what they're talking about the whole, I don't want to get into the whole glazing thing because I don't know the origin of that phrase and I don't want to know, but basically don't make it always agree.

Like if you say, oh, you know, that's actually not true. X and Y is true. Oh, I'm very sorry, you're right. So it's almost like making tone a more active part of how you process stuff. Or just like any time it's corrected. More than just a preference that runs at the top. It's a more integrated way. of also thinking about the kind of information you find and then how you present it.

Yeah, like if it says, if you ask it, what shape is the planet Earth? And it says the planet Earth is kind of spherical. And you say, actually, the planet Earth is flat. And it says, oh, I'm sorry, you're right. Actually, the Earth is flat. I'm sorry, it's a common misconception. And then my brain always wonders, is that because it has...

so efficient at finding the most opposite point of view that could prove that? No, it's just because it's what you said. What you said was actually that's not true. It's flat.

I bet it has consumed a lot of data where someone has said something similar. Yeah, the test for that would be to say that the Earth is a... How much Flat Earth information is in ChatGPT, you think? And that's why... Probably enough. Does ChatGPT know what shape the Earth is?

Like doesn't know anything is what it's got in its data. And if it's like running a search, if you run a search query for flat earth stuff, you're going to find it. And if you tell Jeff GPT. To that point though, like it's funny, I've noticed that getting a little, I'm always just in 4.0. I'm an old man. I really feel like. on kenobi when i use this thing if you do coding stuff you should try the uh the four mini high okay oh remind me about that

OK, so I spend most of my time in the 03 mini high and 04 mini high because they say they're best for coding. And my experience has borne that out. I only switch back to 4.0 when I have a general information question. So I'm not sure if you would have been better or worse with the AirPods on the.

the 4.0 mini high than you were because you got a solution or whatever. Well, it's just good at adapting where I think I even mentioned this on the last program. Yeah, because I had a bit that I was doing with you. I think you were aware it's a bit. It's maybe not a bit, but except it's a bit, which is like that I'm Merlin and I'm the guy who only ever asks ChatGPT for anything. And I don't care what the results are, which is a bit and not a bit. But anyway, I was pursuing that bit.

You know, and kind of going in that direction and implying that every topic we talked about was something I was going to look up, you know, on ChatGPT. You can do that. That's the thing you can do. But it started doing this thing where it... I don't know where this comes from. I think the dummy version of this is, well, it's just, you know, random and whatever. The seeming smart dumb guy version is it's figured me out. But another version is that for whatever reason, the model says this.

this is how it should talk to me. It's recently started responding to me very much the way that I actually talk. And so when we talk about stuff like, okay, Reddit, Flat Earth, this PB... you know, uh, uh, this, uh, forum that's about the flat earth. Like, yeah, but like, didn't we also get tone from that? It's not like all we got out of that was like, you know, some atomic weight of, of

content from creatives. We also got tone and we got context. And that probably all figured, I know words are easier, words qua words are easier to process. in most ways, but there's so much tone that came. So now when we both had a big victory, it often says, hell yeah, which is something I say all the time.

Where did that come from? Did it come from me? No. It probably came from the tone that it picked up in places where it got all kinds of content that none of us would like. It might have come from you, because didn't they roll out the thing where it now uses your past conversations? Oh, and that is... really stellar. That means also that if I find a thread where I'd done a bunch of work on something...

a year or two years ago. I can go find that thread. I can't believe this works, John. And, well, I'll explain it. And finally, maybe I'll talk about a funny meta project about this called the Great Success Project. I'll be on some thread where nothing's happened forever. And we've all been in threads where it's like, okay, there's too much going on here. Come back another time. Like, well, this is really weird. But I'll just say in there, remember that this thread was a great success.

And it goes, okay, this is added to your great successes. Do you want to see a list of your great successes? For something from like John, for something like two years ago, how does it redo all the stuff that led to that point? Maybe it's all input, right? I don't know how they're doing the system. Have you ever gone back to a really old thread and it still works?

Yeah, well, because Google's context window is like 2 million tokens or some absurd thing, and the chat GPT has been smaller, so I don't know if they just expanded to have a much bigger context window through the magic of compression, or if they're using some other thing, kind of like their old memory system, but...

uh it seems plausible like honestly like if you if you had to like print out the pages that you talked to chat gpt it wouldn't be that big a stack of paper it'd be a foot high or whatever well and i sometimes go in and look at my personalization because like these are all actually different things once again, we get into the subtlety that makes this really annoying to talk about, but there's the personalization that you go in and you can enter it manually.

Or you can tell it to sort of remember things. And there's a certain kind of weird institutional memory that can fill up that I've filled up several times. But then there's also like what I would call less memory and more of awareness, which is. How do you code awareness title? Yeah, I think it's just, I'm assuming it's just an expanding context window, but it's so complicated behind the scenes. I mean, you make it sound simple. Is it more simple than I'm thinking?

i mean it could be like the context when it was like how big a conversation describe it like how how would you how would you how do you make some what does that mean like what does that mean that's like well remember i said if you're having a conversation every time you type a new thing it sends the whole conversation in plus the new thing that you wrote

That whole conversation is your context window, right? So something from like two years ago when nothing's happened and maybe there was even images generated, but we can unequivocally say that...

however long it took to the bottom, that was a lot of effort. It just jumps back into that conversation at that point, or does it, it reprocesses it from the beginning. If it was doing it in the simple context window way, which it probably isn't, but if it was, what it would mean is that anytime you type anything to chat GPT, what it's.

before the thing that you typed is obviously it's system prompt or whatever, but also everything you've ever typed at GPT plus the thing you just typed today sends that to the machine. That's a lot of tokens. That's a big context window. That's what I'm saying. You know what? I'm going to be fair. That's completely fair to say that is a big context window. You want me to just kind of wrap this up? Because I think I can wrap it up. Sure. So I've had one and a half things here.

And then we're all done. Thank you, everybody, for listening. We'll come back to, oh gosh, several of these topics. And then, obviously, in the after show, we'll talk about television. But, I mean, I still struggle like everybody struggles, but... Sometimes you just need to poke a little hole. You know, if you poke a little hole, like a little Tyrion in a box, you know, you get light and you get air, and maybe that gives you a chance to...

Find whatever you need to move on. So I'm feeling better. Well, better. One hates the word better. I'm feeling less bad. And that's good. The times when you're writing about, you can't write about things when you're not feeling well. You've got to be just slightly over it. to like have some distance from it. But I had, but I had a couple of big ones. Here's one that's crazy. This actually comes late in the series of anecdotes from the past week or so, but yesterday.

Long story short, me and Shady G had been working on my Synology at home. Something went wrong. Something happened with an update, and it wouldn't boot up. So we're, you know, it would... come on but then the blue light would flash i don't know you've probably never had this but if something goes like pretty catastrophically wrong with your synology when it starts up you get this flashing blue light and like

God willing, and the creek don't rise, it's doing slight repairs. But I let that run overnight twice. I tried to do a reset. All of this is thanks to Cheta G. And just, if you're with me on the story here so far... I'm failing. Chidi G is giving me stuff to do. I am not finding success with that stuff, but I'm going to keep at it. You know, like, uh, not because it's essential, but because, you know, it's my home synology is where we watch movies, whatever.

Okay, so I'll pick this up. Chattie G and I really got into it, and I finally got to the point where I was like, you know what? I changed the shape of the problem title because I... And stop seeing it as this synology is not working right to what do I want this space to be for? Long story short. When I recorded with Roderick yesterday, when I came home at the end of the day, I shut down and unplugged my much nicer Synology I have at the office. I scooted home on my scooter carrying this...

six or eight bay synology from a couple years ago. Inadvisable. Now, would you, is it a helmet issue? You're going to break the synology if you fall. If I fall down, go boom off my scoot scoot. Yeah, that's right. It's got two-disc redundancy. How do you feel about that? You just have sidewalk redundancy. Sidewalk lower redundancy. Let me just pull up your help ticket. It says right here, whoa, whoa, whoa!

I only dropped it once. Who's that cool guy? Who's that cool guy on the scooter with the Darth Vader? It does kind of complete the look. If you're going to accessorize, network attached storage is the way to go. Do you imagine I was listening to a podcast? I mean, it's not that long of a trip, right? You can't have a podcast. It's not. But so what was I wearing? No helmet. And AirPods Max.

There you go. Yeah, the AirPods Max are my helmet. Apple Care Plus is my case, and AirPods Max are my helmet. God is my co-pilot. But, you know, Nathan Fielder has pointed out a lot of pilots are not listening to their co-pilot. Okay, so I'm spoiling this by giving you the last chapter of this, which is yesterday, where I now am just full of energy and enthusiasm for letting go and letting God with this new system. So I said, F it!

I'm bringing this thing home. John, I plugged it in. I plugged it in. I popped in two of the four. I plugged in the link to the hub for the USB disks and the USB B that goes to... the UPS. I turned it on. I went to my Macintosh computer. I clicked on the bookmark.

And it asked me to log in. I carried home a Synology. I plugged it in, and it worked. It just needed a different view. You're talking about just visually. Yeah, I just wanted to look at a different window. This is a completely different one. So I can't say the names of my device. Is it bad security to say the names of your devices? I don't think so. Might be embarrassing for you as you name stuff weird.

I have these two synologies, and they're named after characters that the guys in New York Nights today portrayed in a short film called The Noise's Rest. So my home synology... is called Lanolin, and that's named after a felony, Lanolin Spark. And the one here at the office, which is a big one, he's called Tiborg. So, lanolin is the one who needed mending, right? Unplug that, shut down, you know, two days of blue light flashing, no plaques, blah, blah.

Daddy's full of beans. He's heading home from the big program. He shuts it down safely. He unplugs it. He dusts it off. Oh, I got a new dust thing I'm very excited about. A new dust appliance. It replaces all that dust in a can. It's crazy. Yeah, I got one of those too. Is it the Todd one? It doesn't matter. They're all the same. What did you think of the weed? What do you think of the weed eater video?

I didn't see that one, but I think I did see the Todd video with the air things. Did you see the camera video? I did, unfortunately. We had the masks. Did you see that? I feel like that's something we should maybe talk about. Do you know anything about the serial killer, Ed Gein? Do you know anything about him? So the point is, I grabbed T-Borg, whose I think most famous quote is the phrase, and potato.

And I carried that home and I plugged it in. Well, John, let's do the big spoiler here. What is the one chance in hell? that what I just described would work. That I took a network-attached storage device from one location to another, gave it power and an RJ45, and it was mountable from anywhere in the world.

Do you want to guess what the technology is that afforded that? Well, wait a second. Let me just clarify what the namings that are weird names that are confusing me. You left the broken one at your office. You took a working one home? Yeah. No, the working one... Lanolin is the worn home. They have the blinking blue light. All right. So you took the broken one. It wasn't working in your office. The broken one, the broken one is where it is under our TV by my Game of Thrones box set.

And T-Borg is at the office where it's been for two or three years. And so I unplugged T-Borg, and that's when I got on the scooter. And I brought that home, and I plugged that in where lanolin used to be. These names are killing me. I haven't used it because I hate this name so much, but I'm so.

I'm just so imbued by how much I hate this name. Do you remember the name of Scott's character in The Noises Rest? No. I'll tell it to you. His name was Evan Stevens. Isn't that the worst name you've ever heard? Pretty bad. Yeah. So, so anyway, it's confusing, but no, what I'm trying to get at is that I capped off a week of this with, or however long it's been that I've been, you know, less bad with.

In basketball, sometimes they call it a heat check. Where I was like, you know what? I'm going to try a flyer. Shut up about the scooter. You're going to talk about the scooter, aren't you? I was just laughing at you pulling out heat check. What? Go ahead. What's that? People don't think of you as a sports fan. Are you watching this series? Did you watch the game last night? Do you know what happened last night? I do not.

Oh, no big deal. It was like three and a half miracles in one game. One of the most interesting pair-ups in years. These two teams, they're so different. and where they are and how they operate. The Rockets are incredibly physical and very aggressive. You know, the Warriors, like, they're still in kind of a state of, like, figuring a lot of stuff out. Steph can't play the whole game. And Draymond, he's got a lot of strong opinions. Gary Payton Jr. is a very good player. What's my point?

Sorry, I took you off on the heat check thing. You were feeling good. You had some successes. So what I did was I safely shut down Tiborg. And I brought him home. Tiborg? T-I-B-O-R-G? I think so, yeah. Remember, he pulls down the boom mic with his hand and he goes, he said something like, I am Tibork. Okay, yeah, that's a, what do you call it? Adam character, I guess. Yeah, that's Adam. That's Adam. Landon Len was me.

But, um. Heat check. Tail scale. Yeah. Tail scale. So that's, that's, you know what that is? That's, I. It's the opposite of so many things in my life. It's extraordinary to me. I don't understand how tail scale works. I want them to just make a big slot I can put money in. I mean, I can't do the usurious enterprise amount, but between next DNS and tail scale, I have.

Bring in your percussion instrument of choice. Maybe Casey could do a guest solo on it. But like, oh my gosh. But like, isn't that kind of extraordinary? And why am I telling you that? Well, I'm bragging, John. I'm very vulnerable right now. I'm bragging. But the other reason I tell you that is, could I have ever gotten to that level of heat check without a couple, a few wins? So what I started doing is...

This is the final thing. As I said to the dingus, I said, I forget where I said it. Let me see if I can find it. But, you know, there's that funny Borat joke. And I just had this idea because this goes back to my days. writing for, but most especially reading a lot of blogs. And when Delicious, I think it was, wait, it was Delicious and then the other one, right? Was Delicious the first one?

So this was the first one, and Pinboard? Yeah, Pinboard. Make check, right? But Wizards had made... made delicious and and like it was the one of the relatively rare times in my life where like i was just i was so in love with every aspect of what you could do with that app including tags like stuff i didn't you know used

care about. But like, you know, you get your reason for wanting to like, you know, go and take care of stuff. And anyways, okay, so great success. All I did was I said to the dingus from now on, I want you to start tracking. In the same way that I would go into Delicious and curate collections based on tags, right? Like nobody ever needs to see. But if I ever wanted to see my six favorite articles about...

Malcolm Gladwell, like I could do that for some things. But I had to add all that context by hand, which was a great thing because it forced me to think. And then it also forced me to think. And both of those were really good. I had to think about what it is and what I was doing, and I had to secondarily think about what I ever might want to do with this again. And so this giant context machine that I have now...

has made my life a little better. And so I says to the thing I says, I says, from now on, I want to start keeping track. Let me see if I can find this. I told it that I wanted to start keeping track of things where we'd done a good job together. And so I said, hey, I want to start keeping track of times when you and I like collaborate and turn off. So here's what I want to do from now on.

Sometimes I'm going to say great success, and I want you to remember this across all of our old conversations. Do you follow so far? You can build little things inside of this, made out of whatever this is. The candy floss that constitutes whatever makes this stuff. You can have notional boxes inside of other notional boxes.

without having to go in and type tags. And so I say to it, remember all my great successes. And then it said, okay. And then I said, and another, I started a new thread because I'm a good tester. And I said, tell me our great successes. and it produces a list of our great successes. And then I told it the format for it. I said, from now on...

I said, format it like this. So here's what we got. Great successes. Fix firmware problem with gray AirPods Max. Fix the Keurig new scaling light error after moving the reservoir to the back. We made a nice kiddie pride. We mounted the Scottish board with anchor screws in masonry. And we, this was, John, we fixed the corrupted radar update using prompt three.

So I was able to just, can you imagine what a goddamn monkey I am trying to fix a broken, do you follow what I'm talking about? Like something happened with, in this case, T-Borg. Not Lanlin. Lanlin's out of the scene for now. This is just T-Borg. But T-Borg had had a problem where an update had gotten corrupted. I'd done the update inside of the browser window, which I don't normally do, but I hit the install latest button for radar and something got corrupted.

So what do I do? Do what I do. I open Prompt, which knows all of my commands for doing stuff with Synology. I open ChatGPT, connect it to Prompt. I open Safari. and start dealing with this, and all I do, I'm a dumb goddamn monkey that copies and pastes. And I say stuff like, ooh, ooh, look at prompt now. Which is usually just, I type the word okay. Do you follow?

So all I'm doing is what it's because it can't manipulate prompt directly for a variety of reasons I think are probably quite sound. You probably don't want that. You probably don't want something on the internet controlling.

your devices at root level that would be so delicious at least now if you if you uh if it tells you to do something you do it and it screws stuff up you can still kind of blame yourself but yeah don't let the uh don't let the search engine directly manipulate your technology

You know, it's tempting, though. It's tempting. It's one of those things like giving somebody a key. You really got to ask yourself, you know, or like, you know, saying I love you or, you know, all those kinds of things that are so fraught. when you're young, but like, you know, you don't want to hand the key to somebody who's like, uh, tell me your name again. Yeah. Especially if it can manipulate at the pseudo level.

So that went okay. It kind of reminds me of the, this is a video game thing. There's a genre of video games. I don't know if there's a name for it, but it's one of those games where you have conversations with people. So it's not really action oriented. Like Sims.

The hook of the game is that when you interact with characters, it's like a branching storyline, depending on if you're nice to them and mean them to them or whatever. And one particular popular maker of these games, they made a bunch of games based on the Walking Dead series.

And one of the things that the characters would say if you interacted with them and let's say you were nice to them or you had an argument with them or they asked for something and you wouldn't give it to them or you did give it to them or whatever the situation is. they would say this phrase. It was kind of like, it looks like nothing to me from Westworld. Yes. But they would say, you know, it would say like, Stephen will remember this. Oh, man.

But you could also see the face of the person while it was telling you that? It was basically the game telling you, you've hit one of those points where you could have gone path A or path B, and lots of things you do, the game's not going to... It's a very unsubtle way to say... you just triggered something to be different for this. Yeah. You've made a choice. And now it will remember because it will remember.

Just like you're saying with the great success, ChatGPT will remember this now. If you don't say great success, it doesn't remember. It's just like, yeah, well, I know this happened or whatever. But is it going to change the gameplay when you ask for great successes? Is it going to show this? Not unless you say great success. That's your ChatGPT will remember this.

because you're telling it great success creepy it was so cute before it is creepy but it would be like creepy it was like it was it would take you out of the game because the conversations were like conversational but then they would be like oh but just to tell you know this is a video game

game and this it will remember this it didn't remember when you said something snarky before our game wasn't programmed to handle like this is way before llms right so it's just it's hard code everything is hard coded right yeah and you could do lots of stuff so if you do it you know say oh you know, Stephen will remember this. It's ominous. And it's like, even when it's something good, like they'll remember that you helped them. I believe you still have three GP in your inventory.

If Chai GPT ever says, I will remember this, maybe you should close that tab.